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The Web3 Domain Alliance established itself as a new coalition this week to combat fraud and naming collisions as well as to promote technological advancement and user experience of the next generation of web3 domains.

Unstoppable Domains, Tezos Domains, Polkadot Name System, Hedera and Bonfida, which oversees the Solana naming service, are among the founding members, according to a press release. 

Web3 domains such as .sol or .crypto can be used in place of lengthy wallet addresses for sending and receiving cryptocurrencies, as well as for website hosting and as a single sign-on method for many web3 apps. The domains are minted on the blockchain. 

Demand is rising for web3 domains with unique ownership on two of the largest domain platforms, Unstoppable Domains and the Ethereum Name Service (ENS), reaching all-time highs, according to data from Dune Wizard Metaland on Dune Analytics.

Unstoppable Domains itself recently experienced a naming collision challenge with its .coin domain when it clashed with the. coin domain issued by blockchain platform Emercoin. 

Ultimately, Unstoppable Domains decided to stop supporting the .coin domains and offered the owners credits worth three times what they paid.

A decentralized web brings new domain challenges

In the web2 world, domain names are organized and managed by the nonprofit Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). The group helps to implement domain industry standards.

“We’re still in the dial-up phase of web3,” Unstoppable Domains SVP Sandy Carter said in an interview with The Block at the Web Summit in Lisbon. Carter believes this stage of web3 is emulating the early internet and that standardization will be key to its maturity. 

The organization plans to focus on aligning intellectual property rights of all web3 naming services and protecting consumers.

Why isn’t ENS in the coalition?

The cross-chain coalition includes naming systems across the Polygon, Ethereum, Solana, Tezos, Polkadot, Hedera, Bitcoin and Klayton blockchains. 

Noticeably missing from the coalition is the Ethereum Name Service, which manages one of the most popular web3 domains .eth. 

The alliance contacted ENS to see if it would join but the deal has not materialized, Carter said, adding that it is planning three phases of participants. The second phase will include wallets and browsers, and the third will include metaverse and gaming companies.

© 2022 The Block Crypto, Inc. All Rights Reserved. This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.

Aera, a treasury management protocol, has announced the launch of treasury optimizing vaults for decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) on Polygon. Aera says its goal is to enable crypto projects to manage their token reserves in a more efficient manner.

The current bear market has made treasury management a major concern for DAOs. Their treasuries have declined significantly over the past year, falling from $13 billion to $11 billion, according to DeepDAO. During the summer, they even fell as low as $8 billion. There are a few reasons for this decline which include the undiversified nature of their treasuries, slow governance procedures, and the lack of adequate DAO management tools.

Aera says it wants to solve the latter two problems, according to a statement. The goal is to make treasury-related governance more efficient by providing a tool for DAOs to manage their reserves. DAOs will be able to delegate the treasury management function to a small group of participants. These participants will use Aera’s vaults to manage the reserves of their projects.

DAOs can deploy Aera’s vaults by depositing their treasury tokens into the vaults. They can then assign vault guardians and arbitrageurs from among the small group of participants appointed to manage their reserves. Vault guardians are responsible for setting asset allocation parameters within the vault, while arbitrageurs trade with the assets in the vaults to meet the targets set by the vault guardians. The end goal is to ensure asset optimization for DAO treasury assets.

Aera’s launch is restricted to Polygon-based DAOs. The project stated that it expects to see DAOs on other networks migrate to Polygon to use its services.

© 2022 The Block Crypto, Inc. All Rights Reserved. This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.

Paxos has plans to hire at least 130 people for its Singapore office following the news it has received a license to offer digital-payment token services in the city-state.

Paxos is the first U.S.-based blockchain infrastructure platform to secure a license as a Major Payments Institution from the Monetary Authority of Singapore. It received in-principle approval in March.

Only 18 companies have been granted virtual asset licenses out of around 200 applicants. The company currently has 20 Singapore-based employees out of 350 globally — serving a host of enterprise clients including Paypal, Mastercard, Bank of America and Credit Suisse.

By beefing up its Singapore presence, Paxos is hoping to support current partners in expanding their services into Asia. Paxos will grow out the Singapore office over the next 36 months. It is aiming for 130 people but could hire as many as 180, according to Paxos co-founder and Paxos Asia CEO Rich Teo in an interview with Bloomberg.

Singapore has witnessed the departure of several crypto firms over the last few months as it seeks to bring in greater regulation of the sector — particularly in retail trading. It remains a popular spot for infrastructure and other blockchain companies.

© 2022 The Block Crypto, Inc. All Rights Reserved. This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.

NFTBank, a firm building tools to improve NFT value and data visibility, has partnered with major web3 wallet provider MetaMask. 

Through this collaboration, MetaMask is launching a new NFT portfolio tool that informs users of the changing price value for their NFTs using NFTBank’s valuation engine. The goal of this partnership is to help users make better decisions about their NFT portfolio. 

“The need for understanding the appropriate price of NFTs has become ever more clear with many learning the dramatic volatility of NFT markets the hard way, and simultaneously learning the potential of NFTs as a new digital asset class,” Daniel Kim, the CEO of NFTBank, said in a company statement. 

Other NFT price-tracking tools have emerged to help users watch asset value fluctuations. Floor, founded by Venmo’s former head of mobile Chris Maddern, graphs NFT price data with an interface reminiscent of Coinbase. The firm raised $8 million in Series A funding on June 9, 2022. 

NFT prices among blue-chip projects remain volatile, though they have been steadily rising following the crypto bear market earlier this year. Two of the most popular NFT projects, Bored Ape Yacht Club and CryptoPunks, are both worth about 65 ETH, or $103,000, The Block’s Dashboard showed on Tuesday. 

© 2022 The Block Crypto, Inc. All Rights Reserved. This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.

Microsoft might not like NFTs being used in its own products, but that isn’t stopping it from making yet another investment in a web3 company.

Its latest bet is on South Korean gaming firm Wemade, best known for its popular Legend of Mir series. The company raised $46 million from Microsoft, Shinhan Asset Management and Kiwoom Securities. Although Wemade dates back to the early 2000s, it has pivoted to web3 recently and launched both its mainnet and a stablecoin last month.

Microsoft dipped its toes into web3 earlier this year when it invested in blockchain software company Consensys. A job ad for a web3 and blockchain product manager also suggested it was trying to build up a team internally. In September, it took part in a funding round for decentralized data platform Space and Time. 

But when it comes to web3 gaming, there’s been opposition from within the company’s own walls.  In July, Minecraft creator Mojang Studios, which was purchased by Microsoft in 2014, said that it was opposed to NFTs because they would create a culture of unequal access in the game. It confirmed it doesn’t permit blockchain technology integrations inside Minecraft client and server applications.

Microsoft’s gaming CEO Phil Spencer also expressed concerns about play-to-earn games and NFT integrations in an August interview with Bloomberg.

Wemade’s own forays into web3 haven’t been completely smooth sailing either. Last week it ran into trouble with its new WEMIX stablecoin over a mismatch between the expected and actual distribution of the token and a lack of clear disclosure about the circulating supply.

As a result, the Digital Asset Exchange Association in South Korea issued an investment warning against the token. In a Medium post, Wemade said it would improve its system of disclosure and was trying to get the warning removed.

© 2022 The Block Crypto, Inc. All Rights Reserved. This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.

Crypto markets are bracing for the Federal Reserve’s latest interest rate decision.

Bitcoin was trading at $20,412 — a decline of around 0.7% over the past 24 hours, according to data via CoinGecko. Meanwhile, ether dropped 2.8% to $1,549. 

Altcoins were also down — some more significantly than the leading pair. Binance’s BNB lost 1.6%, while Solana’s SOL and Polygon’s MATIC both lost more than 5%. Additionally, Cardano’s ADA shed 4.1%. Dogecoin also surrendered some of its gains, trading at a 9% loss.

Macro matters

All eyes are on the U.S. Federal Reserve’s interest rate decision later today. The consensus is that a hike of 75 basis points is incoming. However, speculators are watching with bated breath for any signs of a potential pivot before the end of the year. 

The odds of the Federal Open Market Committee increasing rates by 75 or 50 basis points at the meeting on Dec. 14 appear to be evenly split, according to the CME’s FedWatch tool.

FOMC Target Rate Probabilities for Dec. 14 Meeting

Any indication from the Fed that it is looking to stay aggressive could trigger a sell-off in markets, according to Ledn’s Mauricio Di Bartolomeo. “If the Fed signals it will be more ‘data dependent’ going into December, markets could interpret that as a higher probability of a smaller hike in December, which could lead to markets getting bid higher,” they noted. 

The shifting expectations in markets towards a dovish outcome are cause for concern, QCP Capital’s weekly update claimed. “We are concerned about a negative market reaction to persistent hawkishness from the Fed,” it states.

Elsewhere, bitcoin’s correlation to equities has begun to tick higher ahead of today’s interest-rate decision. The correlation between cryptocurrencies and equities fell over the past few weeks. 

U.S. inflation data comes out in a week. QCP Capital expects volatility to pick up between today’s decision and this data point next week. 

Meanwhile, Robinhood delivers earnings after the close today. Following a poor second quarter, where the retail investing app made cost-cutting measures, investors will be looking for signs of improvement. 

© 2022 The Block Crypto, Inc. All Rights Reserved. This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.

Decentralized finance protocol Centrifuge has raised $4 million in a strategic round from backers Coinbase Ventures, BlockTower, Scytale and L1 Digital.

The Berlin-based project enables real-world assets — such as real estate, consumer credit and invoices — to be tokenized and leveraged within DeFi services. Such tokenization has been seen as one of the core use cases for blockchain technology, as it allows for more transparent and liquid markets.

The startup’s most recent publicly announced raise occurred in February of last year and secured $4.3 million from investors that included Galaxy Digital, IOSG Ventures and Rockaway Ventures. It also announced a $3 million strategic partnership with BlockTower in May. 

“Tokenizing very liquid, very well-established assets is only a marginal increase in utility,” Lucas Vogelsang, CEO and co-founder of Centrifuge, said in an interview with The Block. Hence the startup focuses on the private credit market because it’s “largely illiquid” and “very untransparent.”

Centrifuge is one of BlockTower’s first investments in its new $150 million fund. BlockTower’s backing is more than just a simple VC investment, Vogelsang said. The BlockTower credit team has secured approval to be onboarded as a collateral provider to MakerDAO. BlockTower is set to provide $70 million in junior capital alongside Maker’s contribution of $150 million to create a $220 million pool on Centrifuge. 

What’s next for Centrifuge?

Centrifuge has two core users, Vogelsang said. The issuers, which are a small group that do the heavy lifting and will bring the assets on chain, and the investors who will passively hold these assets. 

Right now, investors interact with these assets through Centrifuge’s marketplace Tinlake, which will likely be wound down at the end of this year and be replaced with a multi-chain experience, Vogelsang said. 

“The Centrifuge parachain on Polkadot, that’s what the issuers use to create these assets and then we’re going to bridge them to wherever there is liquidity,” Vogelsang said. “Meaning the issuers can just go and put the assets where there’s the lower cost of capital.” 

“From a product perspective, if I told you that you have to change banks to buy Apple shares you wouldn’t buy Apple shares, right?” he added. 

Bridging helps to solve this problem but it’s also a huge candidate for hacks. More than $2 billion in cryptocurrency been stolen across 13 different bridge hacks, according to data from Chainalysis. Most of these cross-chain thefts have taken place this year. 

Centrifuge will leverage Polkadot’s trustless Snowfork bridge as well as XCM to connect to parachains. 

“I think in the long run, those bridges will be the only ones that survive,” Vogelsang said. 

© 2022 The Block Crypto, Inc. All Rights Reserved. This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.

The Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) successfully completed a cross-currency transaction involving tokenized Japanese yen and Singapore dollar deposits as part of a pilot exploring the potential of DeFi applications in wholesale funding markets.

DBS Bank, JPMorgan and SBI Digital Asset Holdings participated in the foreign exchange and government bond transactions against liquidity pools comprised of tokenized yen, Singapore dollars and Singapore Government Securities Bonds, MAS said in a statement. 

Acccording to a tweet from JPMorgan’s Ty Lobban, the multinational investment bank first used Polygon in order to settle on Ethereum for low fees — which were necessary to reduce operating costs associated with identity verification. It then leveraged Aave’s permissioned pools concept and deployed a modified version of Aave Arc in order to set specific parameters.

CeFi goes DeFi

Financial institutions are catching on to the benefits of decentralized finance — specifically, the removal of third-party intermediaries and their associated costs.

“The live transactions executed under the first pilot demonstrate that cross currency transactions of tokenised assets can be traded, cleared and settled instantaneously among direct participants,” MAS noted in the release on the pilot, known as Project Guardian. “This frees up costs involved in executing trades through clearing and settlement intermediaries, and the management of bilateral counterparty trading relationships as required in today’s over-the-counter (OTC) markets.”

The latest announcement from MAS follows Monday’s news that DBS is partnering with Open Government Products, a tech team within the Singapore government, to launch a live pilot for the issuance of purpose-bound money-based vouchers, which are issued using tokenized Singapore dollars on a blockchain.

MAS is now launching two new industry pilots — one for trade finance and another for wealth management. The former is a Standard Chartered Bank-led initiative to explore tokenized trade finance assets. The latter involves HSBC and UOC working with Marketnode to enable native digital issuance of wealth management products.

“The live pilots led by industry participants demonstrate that with the appropriate guardrails in place, digital assets and decentralised finance have the potential to transform capital markets,” MAS chief fintech officer Sopnendu Mohanty said.

© 2022 The Block Crypto, Inc. All Rights Reserved. This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.

Solend, a Solana-based lending protocol, reported an oracle attack that resulted in $1.26 million of bad debt for the protocol. The incident occurred on Wednesday, as noted by security firm PeckShield. 

Solend runs a decentralized lending system that allows users to borrow and earn interest on crypto assets with the help of lending pools.

The platform acknowledged the exploit and said the attack targeted three lending pools that held Hubble stablecoins, Coin98 tokens and Kamino tokens. “An oracle attack on USDH affecting the Stable, Coin98, and Kamino isolated pools was detected, resulting in $1.26M in bad debt,” Solend tweeted.

The three affected pools have been frozen after the incident. All other lending pools remained unaffected, the Solend further clarified. 

According to the Solend team, the attacker took advantage of an issue in the project’s price-data oracle — a system used to track the prices of different crypto assets. 

Malicious actors generally target lending protocols where they may inflate the price of certain crypto assets and borrow other assets with the intention of never repaying the borrowed amount. This results in bad debt, or debt that is unlikely to be paid back. 

The Solend team has yet to release a post-mortem report.

© 2022 The Block Crypto, Inc. All Rights Reserved. This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.

Episode 106 of Season 4 of The Scoop was recorded live with The Block’s Frank Chaparro and Binance.US President & CEO Brian Shroder.

Listen below, and subscribe to The Scoop on Apple, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Stitcher or wherever you listen to podcasts. Email feedback and revision requests can be sent to podcast@theblockcrypto.com.

Earlier this year, Binance.US became the first U.S.-based exchange to cut bitcoin trading fees to zero.

Since the announcement, Binance.US has consistently ranked in the top three of North America-based exchanges by volume, according to data from The Block.

In this episode of The Scoop, Binance.US CEO Brian Shroder examines how Binance.US is attempting to distinguish itself from the competition, including the impact cutting bitcoin trading fees had on bringing in new business.

According to Shroder, the decision to cut bitcoin trading fees revolved around wanting to make the bitcoin purchasing experience as consumer friendly as possible:

“Our goal was to be able to say very concretely that if you buy bitcoin on any other exchange, you are paying substantially more — without question.”

In addition to appealing to retail investors, cutting bitcoin trading fees also brought in a record amount of new institutional business. As Shroder explains,

“Being able to go to institutions and almost literally have a pitch which is: ‘You have a fiduciary responsibility to your investor-base to use Binance.US because it is free … ’ After the announcement, we had our best month ever in terms of institutional signups.”

During this episode, Chaparro and Shroder also discuss:

• Why a clear regulatory framework in the U.S. will be good for crypto;
• How Binance.US is expanding its product line;
• Treasury management during the bear market.

This episode is brought to you by our sponsor Tron, Ledn

About Tron
TRON is dedicated to accelerating the decentralization of the internet via blockchain technology and decentralized applications (dApps). Founded in September 2017 by H.E. Justin Sun, the TRON network has continued to deliver impressive achievements since MainNet launch in May 2018. July 2018 also marked the ecosystem integration of BitTorrent, a pioneer in decentralized web3 services boasting over 100 million monthly active users. The TRON network completed full decentralization in December 2021 and is now a community-governed DAO. | TRONDAO | Twitter | Discord |

About Ledn
Ledn was founded on the unshakeable conviction that digital assets have the power to democratize access to the global economy. We help you to experience the real life benefits of your Bitcoin without having to sell it. Start a savings account, take out a loan, or double your Bitcoin. For more information visit Ledn.io

© 2022 The Block Crypto, Inc. All Rights Reserved. This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.